The Life Cycle of an Organizer

Organizing is a craft, and like every other craft, it involves learning from people with more–or different–experience. As organizers, we must also commit to being lifelong learners, because the learning that we need to do involves two elements–Ability and Awareness.

Ability refers to the technical skills that an organizer must learn in order to succeed in their job, and can include things like conducting good one-on-ones, being responsible with data, using technology, and running a meeting. Most skills in the Ability category are transferable between campaigns and organizations–if you’ve learned to input data into one CRM, you can probably figure it out when faced with a new CRM.

Awareness refers to a set of learnings that are more amorphous, and can be campaign or geographically specific. This can involve things like understanding how one’s state legislature works (or fails to), or specific knowledge about the political climate in a particular city council when it comes to passing certain legislation. Awareness can sometimes be transferable, but it is often specific to one campaign or situation. Awareness is also a pool that must be constantly replenished. You cannot go back to a city after 15 years away and still expect to understand the political climate of that city council.

Over the course of our time working to develop both of these kinds of organizing skills, we’ve created a kind of taxonomy of the organizer’s life cycle, which has four stages.

Novice (Year One)

Every craft has novices, and their major job is to learn the basic Ability skills that are relevant to the organizing that they are doing. Many base-building groups will call Novices “Organizers in Training” or something similar. Most organizations are focused on making sure that Novices can conduct a successful one-on-one, can canvass (or do other types of in-person cold outreach), can construct a meeting agenda and lead a meeting.

Awareness will come in during the Novice year, but it tends to be centered around understanding that they lack Awareness abilities. (Have you ever heard a first year employee ask, “Why didn’t I learn this in school?”) For Novices, the most important Awareness to gain is the knowledge that “I don’t know what I don’t know”.

Apprentice (Years 2-5)

Those who get through the Novice year graduate to being Apprentices. In the Apprentice years, organizers are generally still focusing very heavily on Ability skills, and may start to develop specialization of some kind. This could mean to build expertise on one particular campaign or issue, or it could involve specializing in a specific kind of workplace (if a union) or group of people. As Apprentices move into years 3, 4 & 5, they are likely to begin developing campaign planning skills as well. Apprentices are often heavily involved in leadership development for members.

Apprentices are starting to become more confident about their Awareness abilities as well. They may start to know who specific elected officials are, and what power those offices have, for example. They should have, by this point, become regular news consumers, and should have a level of Awareness around other political issues in their city or state, not just the ones that they personally work on.

Journeyperson (Years 6-15)

Around year 6, organizers move into their Journeyperson stage. This could involve becoming a Lead Organizer or perhaps an Organizing Director in a smaller organization. Journeypeople are generally confident in their basic Ability skills, having had significant time to master them. They may be developing higher-level Ability skills, such as the ability to start and manage a coalition, or to plan and oversee a large-scale event. Journeypeople are often starting to take on mentoring roles, in addition to their formal supervision responsibilities.

When it comes to Awareness, Journeypeople are not only regular consumers of news in their area, they are also beginning to strategize about how to increase their own Awareness through relationships, gossip, oral history, and other organizers’ work. They should start to develop the habit of doing relational one-on-ones with others in their movement ecosystem, so that they are not just aware of their own organization’s work, but that of their peers.

Adept (Years 16+)

Like everyone else, the Adept must continue learning new Ability skills as they progress through their career. This will likely involve learning how to use new technologies, as few of us are still using the tech we started our careers with! But it also involves expanding our understanding of various tactics, and learning new organizing techniques from younger organizers, who are closer to the base-building work themselves.

The Adept also needs to continue to grow their Awareness, and will now also be in the role of passing on their Awareness knowledge to less senior staff in their own organizations. Rarely do these kinds of organizations have archives–if you want to know what happened ten years ago, you may need to talk to a person who was there then. Adepts often hold the living history of movement groups, and making sure that they have space to share their Awareness and perspectives is important.

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When we talk to our clients about a position they are searching for, this organizer life cycle helps us to place the job in the context of the whole organization. Running a search for a group of Novice organizers for a union is different from looking for a Journeyperson who is going to be able to help a group of Novices and Apprentices grow their Awareness skills.

A healthy organization should have people in all stages of the organizer life cycle, and a commitment by all to growing their Awareness as well as their Ability skills. We hope this taxonomy helps you to think about whether your organization is focused on helping all organizers grow!

Money & Movement Seniority

If you read New Working Majority’s salary survey report in 2023, you know that one of the major findings of the report is that the people who are least happy with their movement salaries right now are the folks who have been in the movement the longest–in our taxonomy, the Journey People and Adepts. Obviously, this finding is worrisome, as we know that burnout is also affecting this group of staff, and the combination of inadequate pay plus burnout is a formula for senior people leaving movement work.

One of the most important steps that movement organizations can take to stop hemorrhaging staff is to embrace the concept of longevity pay, which is a feature of many union contracts. Longevity pay rewards people for their loyalty to the organization, and recognizes their growth within their current position. They are different from COLA raises, which recognize that the cost of living has gone up, and that existing salaries are degraded by those increases.

When combined, longevity raises (sometimes called ‘anniversary’ raises, because they can be aligned to the worker’s anniversary of starting that job) and COLA raises (which typically take effect at the beginning of a new calendar year) are a powerful retention measure for organizations that are frequently losing experienced staff. As we point out in the report, if you limit people’s ability to earn more money in their current job, you are giving them an incentive to apply for jobs with increased responsibility–whether you think they are ready for those roles or not. And staff who are frequently turned down for promotion will begin looking outside your organization for opportunities, if they fear they can never move up within the organization.

At New Working Majority, we’ve made the commitment to longevity raises, as well as to addressing the cost of living. We’ve decided that staff will receive a $2,000 bump in salary for every year they stay with us, in addition to an annual COLA raise. The $2,000 bump recognizes that, while we may not be able to offer a staff person a higher job title, we are still honoring the fact that they grew in their current role, over the course of the year.

If you are leading an organization that has experienced high turnover from late stage Apprentices and Journey People, consider that it might cost you less, in the long run, to pay your existing staff a little bit more from one year to the next than it will cost to replace them on an annual or semi-annual basis! And if you’re leading an organization that hasn’t experienced this yet, consider that longevity pay may help in continuing to prevent it in the future.

This post was originally published on New Working Majority’s blog “Hack the Movement” on March 15, 2025

How is Your Theory of Change Evolving?

Like many of you, I’ve spent this winter and spring trying to figure out what to do in this political moment. I’ve spent over thirty years evolving my personal theory of change, as my knowledge, understanding and experience of using different tactics grew. For most of that time, my theory of change has looked something like this:

The things that notably were added to my own theory of change over time were “provide mutual aid” and “increase joy.” As someone who started her adult life as a queer person coming out during the early days of the AIDS crisis, and one who worked early on in the anti-nuclear movement, I’ve always recognized the power of direct action, and I’ve never been comfortable working in an organization where that tactic isn’t part of the theory of change. Direct action is not just about mass mobilization or giant protest marches for the sake of marching–it also includes things like the burning of draft cards, or spilling blood onto nuclear facilities, or occupying government buildings just to say “we’re here and you can’t ignore us.” And to me, there is no greater joy than working with workers and member leaders to develop as activists, through the process of base-building.

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve recognized that my theory of change no longer makes sense to me, in the context of the US’s slide into authoritarianism. For example–I’ve spent many years of my life working to engage people to participate in elections, and to engage in legislative and policy-making spaces, but I’m no longer convinced, with the time I have left, that those are as important to me personally. 

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop voting, or working with organizations that participate in electoral politics–but I’m having a hard time imagining saying, “they’ve got the money but we’ve got the votes” in a system that is entirely captured by money.

I developed this workshop to use with my own team and clients, to start to investigate how our own personal theories of change are evolving in this moment. I’ve decided that it’s useful enough that I’m sending it out to our list for use in other movement organizations. 

Like many of you, I’m not yet ready to revise our organizational theory of change–but I’ll be thinking more about that this summer & into the fall. If you’re interested in talking about that, hit me up via the contact form to set up some time to talk. And if you do use this workshop, I’m curious to hear how it goes with your staff or volunteers, so feel free to email me about that, too. If we get positive feedback from this, we’ll do a similar workshop with an organizational theory of change focus later in the year. 

This post was originally published on New Working Majority's blog "Hack the Movement" on June 11, 2025

Moving from Leadership to Emerita-level Mentorship

In the beginning, New Working Majority was a consulting shop of one–and one of my very first contracts as a consultant was with Make the Road Pennsylvania/Make the Road Action in PA (MRPA/MRAPA). The director of MRAPA at that time hired me to come and do weekly staff training and coaching with his small but mighty staff team of seven, most of whom had been hired from the organization’s membership base. Some of that involved working through individual organizing challenges, and some of it involved doing train-the-trainer work that would enable those organizers to lead workshops and trainings with members.

After I had been working with MRAPA for a little over a year, the director left suddenly, and Maegan Llerena, who had recently become the Deputy Director, asked me to stay on and continue working with them. Over the course of the next six months, Maegan moved into an interim director role, and was eventually hired as the permanent Executive Director of Make the Road PA/Make the Road Action in PA.

Maegan and I went on to work together, with me in a coaching role, for six more years. Over the course of that time, my engagement with MRPA went through many transformations, as Maegan was able to hire more staff. When we first started working together, I was the person in the room who had the most political experience–so I had more to do in preparing the staff for electoral work. In 2021, Maegan hired Diana Robinson as the Civic Engagement/Political Director for the organizations, and I stepped back from working directly with political staff and started coaching her.

In her earliest days as the permanent ED, Maegan had confided to me that she only planned to stay in that role for five years. That what she saw as her role was to build the organization to the point where it could survive her leaving, and that she would not be leaving her successor the disorganized place she had inherited. Together, over that five year period, we worked to see her vision through.

As the organization moved through the pandemic and grew larger, Maegan and I spent more time working on internal structure–building teams of different levels of management, holding retreats so that their staff could reflect, build camaraderie, and plan for future fights. And as the staff developed, I stepped further and further back from doing things myself, and more and more into an advisory role.

I’ve now had the experience, multiple times, of working with a group of young organizers to design and pull off meetings or events, where the director of the organization came to me after and said, “I felt so useless, I didn’t have to do anything except show up!,” but the first person to say it to me was Maegan. There is nothing useless about having developed your people to be able to act without you.

That’s a principle I’ve held tight onto for my whole career, and it is one I am glad to be able to pass on to others, as I continue to move in my Emerita era.

I ended my coaching with Make the Road PA at the end of 2024, with a triumphant closing of Maegan’s leadership of the organization. She has passed on the reins to Diana, as well as Patty Torres (the former Organizing Director), and now MRPA has co-Executive Directors, as the organization’s permanent staff is more than 30.

Today, I’m happy to announce that Maegan has moved into a national leadership role, as April 1st was her first day as the Co-Executive Director of Make the Road States/Make the Road Action. I can’t wait to see what she’ll do in that role, in this critical moment in our country’s history.  

This post was originally posted on New Working Majority’s blog, “Hack the Movement” on April 3, 2025

Keeping Joy Alive as an Emerita

Thirty-four years ago, in a neighborhood near the Philadelphia airport, I knocked on my very first door as a canvasser. My ‘career,’ such as it was, is now old enough to have children of its own, if it were a person. In a lot of ways, organizing is a young person’s game. I have many, many coworkers, collaborators and allies who were not yet born when I knocked on that door.

Over the course of 34 years spent in movement organizations, I’ve won major legislative and electoral victories. I’ve helped working people form unions, and then taught them how to use their joint energy to make the world better. I’ve organized giant demonstrations, and led marches, and just generally had a blast, because if you’re not experiencing joy, why even do this hard, hard work?

A lot of that time, I did it in stiletto heels, full makeup and party dresses, carrying giant puppets, or dancing through downtown streets. Unfurling banners inside hotel banquet halls where rich guys talked about how they made money on the backs of the rest of us. Having art-making days, where members and volunteers painted signs, made props, wrote chants and songs and learned line dances to be able to protest with fun. Before anything else, I am a trained theater artist, and that training has informed my political work for my entire life.

Around this time last year, I wrote a post about my theory of the Organizer Life Cycle. Maybe even before I’m a trained theater artist, I am a teacher’s kid, and I need to teach people what I’ve learned in my life, or else again, why even do this hard, hard work?

Since I wrote that post last year,  I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting about organizing life, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to add a fifth stage to the Life Cycle–that of Emerita–because that’s where I feel I am, at this point. The Emerita role is not retirement, per se. It’s more a realization that what I have to offer as a guide and advisor is more important than the work I can individually do myself. Partly, I’m just older and slowing down. But also, the type of advice I can give can make a difference for multiple campaigns or organizations, much more of a difference than if I were just running a single campaign or organization.

As part of my own transition to Emerita,  I’ve gradually shifted from taking consulting contracts that involve direct organizing myself, to working as a coach with Executive Directors or Campaign Directors. Come back tomorrow to read about work with one client with whom I’ve spent a lot of time over the years…

This post was originally published on New Working Majority’s blog “Hack the Movement” on April 3, 2025

There’s No Organizing Without Organization

At the end of last year, several of my coaching clients asked me to help them come up with a work plan for 2025. Whenever that request comes, I ask folks to send me their department plan, or if they’re an executive director, their organizational strategic plan. All too often, the response I get is, “I can’t make a department work plan till I have my own work plan!” or “I can’t make an organizational plan until I know what our campaign work is going to be next year!”

Friend, you’re doing it backwards. 

If you are holding a role in a movement organization, this is the time of year where you get to take back some control of your own life, but if you develop your work plan in a reactive way, you’re giving up that control before you get to making it. 

I want to give an example about how we go about making work plans at New Working Majority, in the hopes that it will be helpful to others. 

Step one: Identify Organizational Growth Goals

Several years ago, our team decided that we were going to expand our service offerings to include recruitment. We’d started doing some recruitment for existing coaching and organizational design clients–and when other people heard we were doing recruitment, they reached out for help with that. Because recruitment was becoming a stand-alone service, we needed to decide which of us, internally, was going to drive that growth–and we settled on Alina. ‍

Step two: Identify Buckets of Work Around that Growth and Assign Them

Alina became our Recruitment and Data Manager, and her work plan for 2023 included things like doing a deep dive on the alumni offices of universities with labor studies programs, to find out if they had listservs to send out information to alumni about early career organizing jobs. This led to us participating in our first job fair (shout out to Rutgers SMLR!) in 2024, a practice we are planning to continue in 2025. 

Other people on the team had responsibilities around recruiting as well. Dani, in her role as our Social Media & Marketing Manager is responsible for helping to recruit new clients, and also runs our weekly jobs newsletter and sells job ads. We knew that both of those things would be easier if we were able to connect with our own expanded professional networks on Linked In–so in 2024, Dani’s work plan involved a lot of learning about how LinkedIn marketing works. 

Finally, after we had a first successful year in recruitment in 2023, we decided we needed to hire a Recruitment Director, which then went on Kati’s work plan for 2024. While Matthew ended up with the title of Senior Consultant instead, we never would have found him if we hadn’t done all the work that built that successful part of our business. 

In the NWM example that I cited above, the work plan tasks were focused on effort, and in the first year, did not include specific outcomes. In other words–Alina had to do the work to figure out if any listservs existed before she could actively work with alumni offices to do recruitment. Her goal for that year was to do the research, and the end product was just a list of ways to get in touch with alumni offices. Later, we were able to set goals that involved metrics, but if we are in the research & experiment phase of growth, we want to have tasks that are experimental and may fail–because that’s how we learn things. 

Step three: Mostly Don’t Focus on Specific Campaigns

It’s my pretty firm belief that most organizations should put less of their planning energy into campaigns, and more into planning staff development. I have developed a work planning template that generally asks people to limit their campaign & program work in one bucket. That’s counterintuitive to most people–mostly, people think the campaign work is the primary thing they need to get done in a year. And it’s true that most campaigns have external deadlines that drive us. 

That’s why it is so important to have one’s work plan focused on the things that have internal or no deadlines. Your work plan is not a task list of things that you need to get done for OTHER people, it is a plan to do YOUR WORK. 

In thinking about your work for the year, you need to think about your self-development goals (what do I want/need to learn?), your staff development goals (if you are a supervisor), your member leadership development goals, and crucial organizational goals like board development, fundraising, and teamwork and inclusion. Start putting those things on the calendar BEFORE you add in your campaign goals, so that you can develop a plan to use campaigns to develop leaders and staff. 

What’s Next?‍

For 2025, New Working Majority’s major organizational goal is to fully launch a set of new training offerings. If you’re on our email list and reading our emails, you’ve probably seen announcements of some of our early efforts–look forward to more of that under Matthew’s oversight next year. He’s taking the lead on making sure that work moves forward–but all of us on our four-person team have a role to play in making our growth a success, as outlined clearly in all of our work plans!

This post was originally published on New Working Majority’s blog “Hack the Movement” on March 15, 2025.